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Protect Your Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is any idea, invention, or process that you create. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office outlines four ways to protect intellectual property: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.

Patents

A U.S. patent gives inventors the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the invention for a limited time. Patents can be awarded to a material, a process, a new use of an existing material, or an improvement on an existing technology, so long as it can be demonstrated to be new, useful, and not obvious to other professionals in the field.

Patents provide rights for up to 20 years for inventions in these categories:

Design patents guard the unauthorized use of new, original, and ornamental designs for articles of manufacture.

Plant patents are the way we protect invented or discovered, asexually reproduced plant varieties.

Trademarks

Trademarks protect words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services. Unlike patents, trademarks can be renewed forever as long as they are being used in business.

Copyrights

Copyrights protect the form of expression, but not the subject matter of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work.

A copyright gives the owner exclusive right to:

reproduce the copyrighted work

create derivative works

distribute copies of the copyrighted work

perform the copyright work publicly

display the copyrighted work publicly

The Library of Congress registers copyrights, which last the life of the author plus 50 years.

Trade Secrets

Trade secrets are information that companies keep secret to give them an advantage over their competitors.

UMKC and Intellectual Property

UMKC is substantially supported by the public, including the majority of its research programs. The public deserves maximum return for its investment in research through publication of results, sharing of expertise with students and others, and transfer of technologies to companies for commercialization.

Many university inventors report great satisfaction in seeing their research efforts result in practical benefits to society. Many also find that the increased contact with industry improves the relevance of teaching programs and increases students' chances for internships and employment.

By securing the intellectual property in your research and commercializing innovations, you benefit society and make money for you and university, as outlined in the University of Missouri’s Collected Rules and Regulations

Bayh-Dole Act

Enacted into law on December 12, 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act allows inventions that result from federally funded research to be owned and patented by universities rather than immediately passing into the public domain.

While the universities own the inventions and can exclusively license them, there are many reporting requirements implemented by Bayh-Dole to ensure that the university is protecting patent rights and making the technologies available to the public.